Daily Times

National security and intelligence experts warn that climate change could become a “catastrophic” threat to security and recommended quick action to be taken to mitigate risks, according to a new report released Monday.

“Even at scenarios of low warming, each region of the world will face severe risks to national and global security in the next three decades,” experts wrote in the report released by the National Security, Military and Intelligence Panel of the Center of Climate and Security, a nonpartisan security policy institute.

“Higher levels of warming will pose catastrophic, and likely irreversible, global security risks over the course of the 21st century.”

Pressures from global warming could intensify political tensions, unrest and conflict, fuel violent extremism and break down government security systems, the experts said in a report by the Center of Climate and Security, a nonpartisan policy institute.

Notably, war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East were cited as most at risk, but industrialized regions are vulnerable, it said.

Concerns over the impact of climate change have led to calls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow the pace of global warming amid instances of climate-related extreme weather such as wildfires and floods.

A United Nations report last year warned of dire consequences as well.

The research released on Monday warned of displaced populations driven from their homes by rising heat, drought and dwindling water and food supplies.

Disease would spread, and border security and infrastructure would break down as resources grow more scarce, fueling extremism, crime and human trafficking, it said.

A global pact to fight climate change was agreed upon in Paris in 2015 that aimed to keep the earth’s temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius. However, Trump administration has pulled the United States out of the Paris pact.